Brian Dereu, a wonderful MAKE magazine contributor, has started a new business selling hollow spy coins. During the Cold War, Spies from both the Eastand West used Hollow Coins to ferry secretmessages, suicide poisons, and microfilmsundetected. On May 1st, 1960 U2 Pilot GaryFrancis Powers was shot down over theSoviet Union and taken captive. In hispossession was a hollow silver dollarcontaining a poisoned needle that was to beused to take his own life in such acircumstance. For one reason or another, hedid not use it and was held for 21 months bythe Soviets. He was then exchanged forSoviet spy KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher (akaRudolf Abel) at the Glienicke Bridge, in Berlin,Germany. Colonel Fisher was also nostranger to hollow coins...his original captureby the United States and the European Parliament was investigating the private Grumman Gulfstream II, registered by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.
Last October, the Austin American Statesman reported the plane had previously flown to Guantanamo Bay .
The Richland County, South Carolina.
The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos?both of which affect the nervous system?took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to?among many other organisms?tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, describes a mass spectrometry technique that to test fingerprints to learn what the person has been touching, including drugs, explosives, and poisons.
Because the spatial resolution is on the order of the width of a human hair, the Desi technique did not just detect the presence of, for instance, cocaine on the surface, but literally showed a pattern of cocaine in the shape of the fingerprint, leaving no doubt who had left the cocaine behind.Fingerprint test tells much more than identity (IHT)
